Brightstorm Projects
Brighstorm’s new software helps companies manage water resources
Link Logistics operates one of the largest logistics-focused land portfolios in the United States. Expansive industrial properties like warehouses and shipping facilities often contain impervious surfaces that span the equivalent of 10 or more football fields and cause significant increases in stormwater runoff and pollution.
Traditionally, corporations have focused on reduction in water use, but this approach does not address the environmental and societal impacts from the properties themselves. With this concern in mind, Link approached Brightstorm to seek help in developing a first-of-its-kind sustainability program that focuses on water that falls on the company’s properties but discharges to community streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands, bays, etc.
As the first step, Brightstorm partnered with 2NDNature—a company that specializes in developing software to manage and plan water resources—to build a software platform to enable Link to easily visualize and then mitigate the company’s overall impact.
To create the software, 2NDNature and Brightstorm scientists consolidated dozens of publicly available spatial data layers that focus on water quality and quantity and then developed integrations with layers around social/economic disparity, climate change and flooding as well as proprietary layers around existing government programs that provide cost recovery for water-related projects.
Link’s properties were uploaded into the platform, and the company is now able to perform custom weighted analyses based on their own goals, such as water quality or quantity, social impact, geography, etc.
“The software then assigns rankings and opportunity scores to Link’s various properties based on their potential to provide the greatest return on investment and benefits for the local community,” said 2NDNature CEO Nicole Beck. “Then, after a high-level analysis is completed, more detailed engineering review and design takes place before the projects are implemented.”
Sam Stockdale, the vice president and head of sustainability for Link, said, “Prior to the development of this software module, we—like most companies with large geographic footprints—would have likely spent millions to hire consultants to produce custom analyses to help us meet our water stewardship goals.”
“Prior to the development of this software module, we—like most companies with large geographic footprints—would have likely spent millions to hire consultants to produce custom analyses to help us meet our water stewardship goals.”
— Sam Stockdale, Link’s vice president and head of sustainability
Continuously monitored and adaptively controlled
Stockdale also mentioned that as part of the process, Brightstorm and 2NDNature helped Link develop Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, and the software enables the company to set baselines for its water stewardship goals and track progress against those commitments.
“And we can now automate our environmental, societal and governance (ESG) reporting,” Stockdale added.
“We designed this software platform to act as the programmatic asset management tool for tracking, visualizing and summarizing environmental benefit metrics from projects we help Link develop,” said Brightstorm CEO Craig Holland. “Because it’s adaptable, scalable and easily integrated into most land portfolio management and decision support tools, our hope is that other large companies like Link use it and therefore it helps make progress towards reducing stormwater pollution at scale across the U.S. and even beyond.”